When Mars Hits Your Eye Like A Big Pizza Pie

After reading about astrology I've realized how important it is to keep tabs on the planets (not to mention the moon and sun and the Black Moon of Lilith, which is not even a thing). Otherwise you won't know what they're up to and will be forced to let life proceed along as it will, without any supervision.

My advice? Keep an eye on Mars in particular. That's one aggressive sumbitch.

You probably saw the exciting news the other day on the internet, the world's greatest source of content. Mars was going to get closer to Earth than it had been for 60,000 years and would look as big as the moon! There was even a picture of Mars as a giant tortilla in the sky. Any closer and it would dribble its canals on us. Mars is a very masculine planet and wouldn't think twice about doing that. This was going to go down on July 27th during the full moon. It was going to veer our way sudden-like, go "boogah-boogah," and then peel off to see other planets.

Alas. As is often the case, this was old, recycled news, like when you find out some actor died but he actually did it fifteen years ago. The real authentic tortilla hoax happened in 2003, when Mars made another close approach. It hadn't been that close since giant sloths slowly roamed the Earth, and wouldn't come that close again for 35,000 years. Don't bother to mark your calendars. We'll have been gone as a species for 34,850 years by that point.

The sky show was nevertheless a fine thing to watch. People should always watch planets, or at least track them on the internet, so they're not taken unawares. For instance, Mercury is in retrograde again. I know, I know. Happens all the time. Somebody should explain to Mercury that nobody's falling for that shit anymore.

This explains everything.

Unfortunately for everybody, good old Mars is also in retrograde. Didn't even hear about that did you? Planets are in retrograde when, from our perspective, they appear to be moving backwards. They aren't, they're just trundling around the sun as usual, but because the goatherds of yesteryear thought they were backing up, we have heritage anxiety about it to this day. We can blame a number of things, from flabby thinking to pox to bad sex, on planets being in retrograde. Or we could just crack a textbook.

But wait! There's more! Six planets are currently in retrograde. That's probably one asteroid shy of sending the whole solar system off the rails. Basically you should hole yourself up indoors with cable TV and lay low for a while. It's like when all the women in the dorm get their periods at the same time. Same advice applies.

Well, I'm sold. I got my natal chart done by the Googles. That's it, right up there. I have a Taurus Ascendant. The body of a woman with a Taurus Ascendant, it says here, will tend to develop as the archetype of the ancient Greek goddess Aphrodite. The breasts may be larger than average, and the hips may be wider. I don't know. I do know just about everything on my natal chart is below the belly button. Even my zodiac chart is sagging.

I made sure to check on Mars. My Mars is in Virgo, or would sure like to be. Now that the horny bastard is in retrograde, I am informed that this can be a tough time for us Libras. I was advised to try to relax. "When Mars glides back into Capricorn on the 12th of August, expect inner anxieties to come out. Try to decompress a bit by taking long walks and mindful meditation."

Duly noted. After the 12th, I'm going right back full bore into reckless driving and overeating.

We've Got A Trojan

Recently I wrote about how Pluto, the former planet, got demoted because it hasn't cleaned up its neighborhood of space debris. It's not that Earth is completely tidy, but at least it's not surrounded by crud. This is one of the attributes that allows us to call ourselves a planet. (Also, we're the ones who got to define "planet.") There are asteroids and meteors and comets and other dust bunnies in the vicinity but for the most part our planet has long since vacuumed up everything major in the region. The odd space rock will wander on through, but those don't count against us; we're just being hospitable, even to the point of occasionally giving them a soft spot to land. (Sorry about that, dinosaurs. And Russians.)

We do get to keep a moon. A planet can accumulate a pet moon in a number of ways. It can start out with a gang of dust and gas around it that begins to associate ever more closely until it spheres up. Or, it can steal an already-made one that was just passing through. The way we got our moon was that somewhere along the line something huge smacked into us and knocked a chunk out. So our moon is like the loogey we hawked that didn't quite clear our shoulder.

The reason there's ever a solar system in the first place is that masses are attracted to each other, because space is a big and scary place to be by yourself; we call it gravity, but it's really atomic loneliness. Of the stuff in the disc that became our solar system, almost all of it got claimed by the sun itself, and the leftover dribs and drabs became us, our planet buddies, and other miscellany. Everything started to bunch up. We get something solid to stand on because we are close to the fire, so all the rocky bits and iron and metals with a high melting point were at our disposal. There isn't that much of that. Most of the stuff running around the sun, by far, is in the big gas planets. Jupiter's the biggest, having formed first, and Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune had to make do with what was left over. I'm not sure you can land on Jupiter or Saturn, although you could maybe sort of land through them. Uranus and Neptune are icy, so you could stand on them. Briefly.

Artist's Depiction

We're all very fond of our moon and many of us have thought it would be cool if we had another. So a few years ago we found out we do! Sort of! We have our own Trojan Asteroid, and it orbits with us, if not around us. A trojan asteroid is a space rock that travels in the same orbit as a planet or a planet's moons, simply by positioning itself at a Lagrangian point. So there you have it.

Lagrangian points are certain locations--five of them--at which the combined gravitational pull of two massive objects, like the Earth and the sun, allow a smaller object to travel with them rather than going haywire. Our trojan is leading us around the sun, even though it is only a thousand feet across. It's like a weiner dog straining at the leash. I don't know why it's called a trojan. It has no protective qualities at all.

Since there are only five Lagrangian points associated with the Earth and the sun, you'd think scientists could have found the sucker before now, but it's little and hard to see in the daytime, which is all the time. But also, it doesn't just hang out at the predicted point. It oscillates around it, wildly, in what is called a "tadpole-shaped loop," and if that doesn't cheer you up, you should probably seek pharmaceutical help. Scientists might have been encouraged to refer to its path as a tadpole-shaped loop in order to avoid calling it a spermy loop. They're in enough trouble with the Trojan thing.

So we can't gaze on our trojan at night, but still it's ours, and the least we can do for it is give it a better name than "2010 TK7." I'm going with Skippy.